A family breakdown led to Fara Williams being homeless and estranged from her mother for nine years. Photograph: Jon Super for the Guardian

When Fara Williams lowers her head and begins to cry it is as if a small door opens and the past pours out of her. England’s most capped footballer overcame being homeless for years and so there is also great strength behind her tears. Rolling down her face they are made even more moving by the composed way in which Williams had spoken for the preceding hour. Now, sitting in a room at the Liverpool Academy in Kirkby, the 30-year-old midfielder is strong enough to cry openly.

Williams has won 130 caps for England, and five for Great Britain, and she helped Liverpool secure successive league titles over the past two tumultuous seasons. On Sunday she will play for England against Germany in a significant marker of how much women’s football has developed. It is the first women’s match to be played at the new Wembley and the surprised authorities, concerned by transport problems, had to limit the crowd after 55,000 tickets were sold so quickly. England’s men had attracted just over 40,000 fans when they played Norway at Wembley in September.

But Williams’ life is far more raw and real than mere sport. She was homeless for seven years, playing for England while reeling from one anonymous hostel to another in London. Her two worlds were kept separate and only a few people knew that an England footballer lived on the street.

Williams is calm when detailing how a family breakdown led to her becoming homeless and estranged from her mother for nine years. She starts to weep only after celebrating her mum in words shot through with typical clarity. “She’s been brilliant,” she says of Tanya, with whom she has been reunited. “It’s been lovely. You know, over time, you realise that life is short. You don’t have a long time here. So I wanted to be with her again. We’ve never spoken about what happened but the important thing is that, to me, my mum’s a hero in my upbringing …”

The happiest words burst the dam. All the previous reflections on homelessness could be easily controlled, but this is different. This is much more personal and it seems right to step outside and allow Williams some time alone. When I return she wipes her eyes. She looks very young – but the old composure and resolve have returned.

“When I was in the hostels I didn’t engage with people,” she continues. “I kept myself to myself. I certainly put a barrier up. I never smiled. I was probably quite intimidating. And when I had that wall up I pretended I was too hard to cry. I see it when I train homeless girls today. They have the same wall but the important thing is to treat them as normal people – and don’t look down on them. I was lucky I had football. A lot of homeless girls don’t have that hope. They think: ‘If it’s my income support day today we’ll use the money to buy the drugs and alcohol to get through the day. If it’s your turn to get income tomorrow we’ll use your money to buy what we need then.’ It’s a vicious circle.”

Williams, in contrast, had hope and ambition as an international footballer. “Yeah, and most homeless girls have nothing.”

Did she come close to losing that hope? “No,” she says after a pause. “Never. Football never allowed me to. I had that focus and belief I was good at something. That’s an incredible thing when it feels like you’ve got nothing else.”

Williams grew up on an estate in Battersea. “It was never easy for my mum,” she recalls. “We were a one-parent family and there were four kids. She supported me as much as she could but it was a struggle to get my football boots. I was always closest to my mum. I was so protective of her and, although I was separated from my mum, I thought about her every day and I’m sure she did the same about me.”

There had been problems with Williams’ real dad and her stepdad and she was brought up for a while by her grandparents. Eventually, back home with her mother, her aunt moved into the house and it was then that Williams ended up on the streets. “Many of the kids on the estate respected and loved my mum and she looked after them. It was typical of mum that she took my auntie in to live in our house. But my auntie and me really clashed. My auntie shouted at me to get out. I said: ‘OK, I will.’ I was 17 and I thought I’d be OK. But you don’t really realise how big a step it is. It hit me hard. But I was too ashamed to tell anyone and I didn’t want to go back. I would have seen it as a weakness and it would’ve made me think they had won.”

Was she scared on the streets? “A little bit. I was scared that first night walking past the homeless people. Like everyone else I had a perception of what homelessness looks like. I’d see this homeless guy coming towards me and I’d think: ‘Bloody hell, I’m scared. He’s mental. He’s crazy.’ I’m walking past people with cans – and even those without cans looked rough. I’m absolutely cacking myself.”

Williams found a surreal way to protect herself. “I used to turn as I walked. I’d walk 100 yards and spin around. I looked mad myself. But one guy told me that, to stop people coming near them, the homeless act like they’re mad. They make loud noises to intimidate you. But, in fact, they’re more intimidated by the general public. Until you speak to them you don’t understand. I also started making loud noises if an intimidating group was near me – to make it look as if I was crazier than them.”

She smiles sadly. “The most annoying thing about being homeless is that you get judged without people knowing your story. That was the hardest thing for me. Sometimes it just happens. You can lose your job or your family.”

Williams hid her homelessness from her friends in football and the truth only emerged when Hope Powell, who would coach her for years in the national team, recognised the teenager’s problems soon after she had left home. “We had an England Under-19 get together and I was hovering around at the end of the trip. I’d just spent a week in the team hotel and Hope said: ‘Where are you going?’ I said: ‘I don’t know.’ So she drove me to King’s Cross and the homeless unit. I would not have had the courage to have gone myself.

“Hope was really supportive. Her mum was a foster carer and so she understood. She pushed me to go to the hostel. She was like a mum to me. Once I was settled in the shelter Hope bought me a sleeping bag. It sounds pathetic but when you’re on a hard bed with other people’s sheets, it meant so much.”

England’s Fara Williams jumps with the ball during the friendly against Japan at Pirelli Stadium in June 2013. Photograph: Tom Dulat/The FA via Getty Images

Williams made her full international debut for England soon afterwards, in 2001. She was just 17 and she had moved to a hostel in Victoria. “It was just across the bridge from Battersea. I bumped into one of my old mates I’d played with at Chelsea and she said: ‘What are you doing here?’ I told her. She was nice to me and I went to her place for a warm bath. But at first I didn’t feel comfortable telling anyone.”

When did she finally tell her England team-mates she was homeless? “I’m not really sure. I was playing in the Euros in 2005 and I was signing on and staying in a different hostel. Probably only Kelly Smith [England’s greatest female footballer] knew. Kelly had her own problems and she used to see her counsellor around the corner from my hostel. I’d seen her in a Starbucks and said: ‘What are you doing here?’ She said: ‘I’m seeing my counsellor.’ Kelly’s an unbelievable footballer and I don’t know how she does it. I used to room with her and she seems very quiet but she’s such a good person and so humble. She’s also the funniest person in the England team.”

How did Williams finally escape her homelessness? “I came up here to play for Everton. Mo Marley [then the Everton coach] helped me so much. Mo used to pay for my travel up and down from London but then she got me a job. She said I’d be a great fit as an FA community coach and it’s down to her that I could come up here and live. I also had fantastic support from my Everton team-mates, like Amy Kane, whose family took me in and helped me get on my feet.”

Williams was 25 and, until then, she had not even been able to sign an England contract. She admits her naivety. “I couldn’t get a contract with England because I needed to sign on – and the England contract would have just covered the cost of the hostel. I now know I could have used it for rent but as a young girl I didn’t understand that.”

She began to live a conventional life away from London. But the old pain surged inside her for she still missed her mum. “The crazy thing was that we didn’t speak for nine years. I only saw her once – at my granddad’s funeral. We passed each other but didn’t say anything. I’m really like my mum. We’re both very stubborn.”

In 2009 England reached the final of the European Championship. Williams was at the core of their team but she was struggling on the inside. She had scored earlier in the tournament against Italy and made the shape of a heart as she celebrated. Her mother took it as a sign and tracked down Fara’s number through one of her closest friends in London. “I received a message on my phone,” Williams remembers. “I saw ‘Mum’ at the end and I deleted it without reading it. It was the first time she’d tried to contact me. And, later, I wished I’d read it. I wished I’d kept that number. I remember just crying on my bed.”

Two years later, during a World Cup qualifier against Switzerland in 2011, Williams “scored in the 50th minute and my mum’s into all these tarot readings – all that crazy weird stuff. So for me to score in the 50th minute was a sign to her. We’d qualified for the World Cup and I was in the hotel and the girls were drinking. I got this message from my mum and I went up to my room to read it. She said: ‘Thanks for the goal and the celebration’ and she mentioned that I’d scored in the 50th minute and that she turned 50 in two days. She ended with: ‘I miss you. Love Mum.’ I cried and cried.”

When they finally met, “it felt natural and like we’d never been apart. The worst thing was just saying goodbye and going away again. I knew it would be a while before I saw her because I was living up here [in Liverpool]. But I knew she’d started following football because of me. When I moved out she tracked my career.”

Williams will win her 136th cap on Sunday and she suggests, “that the emotion and crowd will make it special – especially at Wembley against the best team in the world.”

Her mother will be in the crowd – and there will be renewed pride in the extraordinary achievement of a once-homeless Battersea girl. Williams, shyly, believes she is a female equivalent of Steven Gerrard. “I’m most like Steven in the sense that I play in the hole and I like to make those big diagonal passes. But I don’t really want to compare myself to him because he’s a warrior. I also used to like [Claude] Makélélé because he did the simple things so well and made John Terry look like a worldie …”

How did she feel last season when Liverpool effectively lost the title at home to Chelsea and Gerrard suffered his excruciating slip? She jokes initially, hailing her Chelsea roots, before underlining that she understood the pain of Liverpool’s fans and stressing how much she owes the city. But her close relationship with everyone at Liverpool meant she could tease them cheerfully. “People here were complaining that Mourinho’s rubbish. I said: ‘Yeah he’s that good you’re still talking about him five days later.’”

Her good humour is a sign of how much Williams loves living in Liverpool and being reunited with her mother in Battersea. Last month she won another championship medal when Liverpool Ladies pipped Chelsea to the title. On a final day of wild drama, Liverpool were third in the table at kick-off, three points behind Chelsea, but they beat Bristol Academy 3-0, with the final goal scored by Williams. Chelsea’s loss to Manchester City that same afternoon meant Liverpool had, somehow, retained the title.

She smiles even more happily when remembering her mother’s response to that unlikely victory. “My mum never stopped telling me we were going to win the league the whole season. She’s kind of crazy anyway. For weeks and weeks I’d say to her: ‘Mum, we’re out of it now,’ and she kept saying: ‘Trust me, you’re going to win it.’ The first thing I saw when I switched on my phone after the game was a message from my mum. She just said: ‘Told you …’”